Fish & Chips (Cut & Run 3)

Only Ty wasn"t having fun, and he wasn"t willing to go too far where he couldn"t be found if there was trouble. The four-man support team that was supposedly out there somewhere wasn"t really a lot of help. Ty hadn"t seen hide or hair of any of them. He knew it was out of necessity; they were merely there as a fallback, a last-ditch emergency response team if everything went tits up. Still, Ty would have felt better if they"d been given some way to contact them other than going out on the deck and waving their arms, hoping one of them was watching.

None of that would have made him feel better anyway. He didn"t know any of the other agents, and he didn"t trust what he didn"t know.

He sat there for barely five more minutes before he lost the will to be bored. He hefted himself out of the lounger and turned to head back into the cabin, determined to find something to keep his mind busy that didn"t involve disaster scenarios.

He went to Del Porter"s leather satchel, opened it, and peered inside with a twinge of guilt. He didn"t like going through Del"s personal belongings any more than he liked being Del. Granted, they"d already made a cursory search of all the luggage, including this bag, but Ty had tried not to delve too deep.

Now, though, he was desperate.

Inside the satchel were a few Sudoku and crossword puzzle books, which shocked Ty, since the guy wasn"t exactly supposed to be the intellectual type. He reached in and pulled a few of the books out, flipping through them to find them almost entirely filled in.

He groaned in disappointment. That would have given him something to do, anyway. He"d been avoiding the ship"s fitness areas simply because he didn"t like the crowds, but he would do a few laps around the designated jogging track if all else failed. If he could find music, he"d be better off. He remembered seeing an MP3 player in one of these bags.

He set the books beside him on the bed and looked back into the satchel. There was a small, pale green iPod and a set of matching earphones, a stick of deodorant, a pair of reading glasses in a Gucci case, and not much else.

Ty picked up the iPod with a pleased smile. He plugged in the earphones and put one bud in his ear as he turned the device on to make sure it would work before he got ready for a run. He set it to shuffle and put it on his knee as he reached for the Gucci eyeglass case.

He opened the case out of curiosity, wondering if they really were reading glasses. He was almost surprised when he found they were, and he held the stylish frames up to look them over. They were rectangular wire frames with thick, flat legs. Not exactly what Ty would have chosen if he had to wear glasses, and they had probably cost more than he made in a month.

The most interesting thing about these reading glasses was that when he held them up and looked through them, they didn"t alter his vision at all. Ty frowned at them and slid them on as the iPod began to play a spoken word track in a language Ty wasn"t sure of.

The reading glasses were merely glass, and they were heavier than they should have been, slightly reminiscent of the sunglasses he"d been given to take pictures. He took them off and turned them over, bending the legs experimentally. He couldn"t concentrate with the foreign words in his ear, though, and he picked up the iPod to peer at the track name. He"d thought it was an audiobook track, but it was labeled as a song he"d never heard of. Ty huffed and thumbed over to the next song, but it, too, was a spoken word track that was labeled incorrectly.

Ty stared at it, listening to the words in his ear. He could catch certain words and phrases of the garbled recording, enough to pinpoint the language as Italian and enough to recognize it as a conversation, not a lecture or book being read. He also recognized that it wasn"t a studio recording. It sounded very much like the result of a bug placed close to a person speaking.

Ty"s body went cold as he realized what he"d found.

“Shit,” he drew out slowly. He stopped the track and pulled the ear bud out of his ear. These were wire taps. These were professional-grade wire taps on Del Porter"s iPod. How did the office miss this? He turned the glasses over in his hand again and snapped one of the legs off, not really surprised when he found a thin wire snaking through the plastic. He shook the hollow arm and a flat receiver roughly the size of a dime fell into his palm.

“Shit,” he said again.

He squinted at the mechanism. He didn"t recognize the model, which meant it wasn"t American, Russian, or British.

“Shit, shit, shit.”

Del Porter wasn"t who they thought he was. The Bureau had nabbed somebody else"s informant. And whoever was behind Del Porter"s spying probably knew Ty and Zane"s secret as well.

TY STEPPED into the ornate casino room and looked around quickly, searching out Zane or any of the other members of the team who might have been hanging around. Where the hell were all the nosy support personnel when they were needed? Ty still hadn"t spotted a single one of them.

He moved through the crowd slowly, seeking his partner amid the throng of gamblers, but he knew the poker game wouldn"t be out here.

The ship-run games and tables were a joke, so the high rollers who had come to play had claimed a private room for hosting their own evening

“tournaments.” Ty scanned the back walls over the gaming tables, finally seeing a door behind a strategically placed decorative screen. It was possibly a staff entrance, but more than likely it was the private room that played host to all the whales.

He made his way toward it, the little iPod held tightly in his hand, hidden inside his pocket. Zane had their only gun, and Ty hadn"t even grabbed a knife for fear of not being able to conceal the weapon well, and he felt naked as he moved through the crowd.

He stepped behind the screen to find an intimate, richly decorated room with a private bar and six draped tables. He stopped at the entrance, looking for Zane eagerly. If they could get what was on that iPod to someone who could speak the language, it might be enough for them to end this assignment tonight. Not only that, but the possibility that Del was an informant might be enough to make the FBI pull him and Zane completely off this goat rope. They could be screwing around in a foreign entity"s investigation, and the Bureau hated sticky political messes.

Most of all, though, Ty was concerned that whoever Del was reporting to might be on board with them and may have already made him and Zane as frauds.

He spotted Zane, sitting with his back to the entrance at one of the closer tables. Ty shook his head. Zane must have been the last one to arrive to settle for sitting there, facing the wall. Ty moved slowly, circling around a little so Zane would see him approach in his peripheral vision.